Principles of Liberty, Principle 24: A free people will not survive unless they stay strong.
There are a number of levels on which a free people can stay strong. We can stay strong physically, by caring for our bodies, engaging in honest labor, and developing healthy habits. We can stay strong morally by training ourselves to resist “instant gratification”, observing the Golden Rule, and exercising self-control and restraint. We can stay strong as a society by upholding and defending the foundations of our society – faith, family, self-reliance, civic pride, and mutual responsibility.
Just a glance at the above list will reveal that on many fronts today America is failing. The nation is weakening because her people are weakening.
Weakening spiritually: We’ve traded “live free or die” for the cradle to grave nanny state. We’ve traded “One nation under God” for “whatever is right in your own eyes.” We’ve abandoned the concept that there is an ultimate system of reward and punishment, and this has “freed” us to live as animals, with no thought of consequence.
Weakening morally: Few people, it seems, even make a token attempt to subdue their lusts or overcome the “I want it now” syndrome. Our government has moved from encouraging thrift as a foundational economic principle to encouraging debt for the citizenry, and like sheep we follow along. We have “cast off restraint” and even if we do not participate in immoral activity, we refuse to confront and debate those who do.
Weakening Physically: Many of us are overweight and out of shape. Most 30 year old males today could not do half the daily labor a lad of 12 or 14 was capable of in 1800. We take no care for our bodies, and then we expect the government to care for us when we are weak, fat, diseased, and frail. Society ultimately pays the price for our overindulgence and sloth.
Weakening Families: We have related in previous articles in this series the immutable fact, the natural law, that family is the foundation of society and right government. Yet in the United States today enemies of the people and the state are attempting to redefine family in a way that will ultimately destroy the very fabric of a free society and subvert our ability to raise another generation capable of self-government and the preservation of freedom.
Weakening self-reliance: Benjamin Franklin once said that “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” It would appear he was prophetic. John F. Kennedy once said “Ask not what your country can do for you, as what you can do for your country.” The quote seems trite to us today, when nearly half of all American households include a member who receives some form of government “entitlement” benefit, and half of all households pay no federal income tax. We live in an age of “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine” thinking; and it is bankrupting our nation. Rather than rely on ingenuity, determination and hard work to elevate our economic status or provide for our needs, we expect to be richly rewarded for the minimum amount of effort, demanding from the government and our employer what we would not otherwise receive in a free and open, self-adjusting economy.
Weakening Civic pride: A recent post on Facebook noted that a certain actor has been all over our news outlets because of his unsavory and anti-social behavior. In the same time frame a number of men and women have lost their lives in defense of our country and our freedoms, and they are not even mentioned. Few outside of their families and friends can name them. Our government, of course, with constant revelations of corruption, abuse of power, and waste, gives us little to feel proud about. The sense of America as a nation with a destiny is waning, and few of us have the heart to try to save her against such long odds.
Weakening responsibility: Few of us are responsible anymore; nothing is ever “my fault” or “my responsibility” and I will sue my own mother and father to prove it. The United States has many lawyers that “specialize” in helping people “get what is theirs” – from the government and from each other. They have become a class unto themselves, despised by the populace on the surface and yet clung to because we all want to prove our “rights”, prove we are “entitled” and prove it isn’t our fault or our responsibility. Other nations look in astonishment at our litigious ways. Our courts are clogged with frivolous lawsuits, and there is no sign of relief.
All of these burdens and weaknesses are, of course, surmountable; but is it not interesting that the fate of the nation, ultimately, rests on the decisions, proclivities, and activities that each of us, as individuals, engage in? If “we the people” cannot reign in our appetites, control our lusts, strengthen ourselves physically, morally, spiritually, and mentally, and accept less from our government in order to preserve our freedom, then “we the people” will certainly become the servants of tyrants.